All of a sudden, due to COVID-19, there is a surge in the number of applicants looking for options for working from home. A report published on Livemint on 31st May 2020 says, "Unlock 1.0: IT-ITeS sector expects a rise in contractual hiring". According to the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF), out of 4 million IT-ITeS workforces, about 500,000 were contractual or temporary workers as of 2018. That's expected to grow at an average annual pace of 13% to 720,000 workers by 2021. Job portal Indeed India data shows, searches for remote work have increased over 377% as a share of all searches during February-May 2020. Listed jobs for remote work and work from home have also seen an increase of 168% in the same period. Many companies are shifting to the work-from-home work model on a permanent basis, twitter being the first to announce permanent work from home model. Indian IT companies like TCS & Wipro are also looking for workforce management changes. So why should a technology-driven company look forward and slowly adapt to the remote developers model? Here is our take on it: -
Access to a global talent pool
With a fixed office work setting, you might face difficulties in bringing top-talents to work at your location. Thus at times, you may have to compromise quality. What if you get a highly-talented developer from New Delhi working for your project at San Francisco? Sounds great right? So that's where the future is moving to and you should try this. You could access engineers from a world-wide talent pool customized to your own needs. This gives the flexibility of having a great team with a perfect work-life balance for your employees.
Cost optimization
When you have the onus of managing the entire workforce, right from payrolls to employee benefits, it acts as an overhead for your organization. Instead of that, why not have a lean team which would focus only on the core business while these processes could be taken care of by someone else? While it would not only save you from some major investment, this would also ensure some effective compensation management.
Adaptability to uncertain macro factors
COVID-19 pandemic has testified to the fact that organizations around the world need to have efficient work-from-model into place. Thus, an extended remote team always helps your organization in not only accessing the global talent pool but also being flexible enough in such situations. Also, imagine the amount of time saved in traffic and the small steps towards reducing carbon footprint? Well, all these shows its time for us to adapt to these models of employment for a sustainable future ahead.
Flexibility
A distributed work-force ensures you can effectively strategize upon the human resources management. While compensation management is one of the important areas, availability of resources on multiple fronts such as PHP, Java, Angular react, JQuery, Core Artificial Intelligence also could be availed from across the globe at a much-organized contract form. So for e.g. you need a Java developer today and after somedays, you need someone skilled in NLP. So instead of doing the entire recruitment process on your own, you may wrap-up the entire process quickly with the help of a third-party provider.
Liquid workforce
This term first coined by Accenture is becoming a reality in today's age. Digital Transformation is the next big thing and most of the companies are adapting to this transformation. In this age, it becomes really important for the employees to develop the ability to quickly learn, unlearn, and learn. Thus, in such a dynamic environment, the remote workforce with the requisite skill set is extremely important. Adding to these, they are also a part of your team and you have entire control on how to leverage their skillsets.
Major tech companies are embracing remote-work model, they are joining this movement to make the work-force more agile and adaptive. Are you ready for it?
